This sub mod changes garrisons in many cities, with most of the capitals getting one or two more units, in most cases not levies but hoplitai (in Hellenic cities) and even in Carthage a unit of sacred band infantry. The cool down period has also been decreased in all cities, from 10 to 6 turns.

Reasons:
Lilibaeum was an impregnable citadel under Carthaginian control and historically was never conquered by Pirros or Roma, it was delivered to the Romans after the 1st Punic war. Therefore it should be harder to conquer by the player.
Utica and Capua were some of the biggest cities of the time, should also be harder to conquer.
Felsina got a garrison to represent the population there and to make it harder for the Roman player to conquer it (normally the city is conquered very early on the campaign).
Mastia got a garrison to represent the Carthaginian difficulty in fighting the Iberian tribes in that region and because it’s a bit easy to conquer the city after destroying the roaming stack in the region.

To install just extract the file and replace it with the campaign_script file in EBII/data/world/maps/campaign/imperial_campaign. Remember to do a backup of that file in case I did something wrong and the game crashes or you end up not liking it.

So I was reading an interesting Osprey book about Greek and Roman fortifications and artillery in the Hellenistic period and thought to myself: man, real shame that something similar doesn't exist in EBII. Well - now it does!

This mod will change the towers of large and huge cities to fire oxybeles bolts rather than their usual anaemic arrows. If that sounds wildly unbalanced and a great way to make sieges impossible, well - you would be completely right, actually, and my first attempt at this mod was ludicrously broken.

But, after several iterations, I think the mod is fairly balanced although it will obviously change the way you must approach fortifications.

This mod is built with two goals in mind:1. Historical verisimilitude - defensive artillery was a key feature of Roman and Greek fortifications in the Hellenistic period and now that's reflected in the mod. 2. Change the siege dynamics for larger, better-fortified cities to make attacking them a more challenging strategic endeavour. Rapid assaults will be costlier - if you're taking an important city or fortress, starve them out, bring siege artillery, or accept higher losses.

CHANGELOG
- Large/huge non-barbarian cities' towers will fire the same shot as an oxybeles arrow-projector, but with half the range (so the attacker's stone-projecting artillery can bring them down). The shot will absolutely go through several units at once but has a very slow reload rate (expect no more than 2 volleys before siege towers reach the walls). Huge cities have slightly faster-firing arrow-projector towers.
- Rams and siege towers have double health so defensive arrow-projectors can't really bring them down.
- However, they can be set ablaze - ignition chance was almost meaningless in the base mod since only hot oil could ignite siege engines, but now your towers can too. All siege engines have a 10% or 20% (varying by culture and engine) chance to be set alight by a flaming shot. On average you will get two volleys before the towers/rams reach you so you may bring down a tower or two - in vanilla EBII there was no way to stop them at all.

INSTALL INSTRUCTIONS
- Download the attached file and unzip it to your desktop.
- Navigate to your Medieval II Total War\mods\ebii\data folder and make a backup of the descr_walls.txt and descr_engines.txt files.
- Copy the mod files from your desktop to your Medieval II Total War\mods\ebii\data folder, overwriting both the vanilla ones.
- To uninstall, just replace your modded files with the backups.

FINAL NOTES
This mod only changes the large/huge city walls of "civilised" factions, not the first-level stone walls or any of the wooden walls. If you spot a bug, inconsistency, or something else gone terribly wrong, post in the thread and let me know.

After some testing and feedback from other players I have concluded that it's better to just put it public for players to try. This change will make the AIGenerals harder to kill and since most of the fight in EBII ends when the other army routs (which is historically correct), it will take longer for it to happen, making your battles a lot harder (I still didn't lost any because of it but had a really hard time to win and in at least two battles I had to target the AI General on purpose because otherwise I would have lost the battle).

Soo, what you have to do?

Open the export_descr_character_traits.txt with Notepad ++ and search for AIGeneral Hitpoints. Change it to +3 on all levels (you will have to copy and paste on the first line of the AIGeneral level because it doesn't have any additional Hitpoints there, on the others you can just change the value). If you feel its too much, you can later change it to other levels, but remember that you will find different types of AIGenerals and others will have other types of bonus that increase their Hitpoints, making you feel that it is too much when its not.